First official day in Lisboa!

Something that I have learned about myself on this family vacation is that I do not like being a tourist. The pressure of seeing everything a city has to offer with a very limited amount of time sometimes makes me feel overwhelmed. Also, being a tourist you always feel lost. I prefer to live a while in a city. I know that it is unreasonable to say that I will live in every that I visit, but I can say that Valencia was my favorite city in Spain and I think that the reason for this is because I lived there. We started out our first real day in Portugal taking a tour in a bus, which to my disappointment and to Gildi excitement was an air-conditioned bus instead of a double decker. The woman who was giving us the tour was a bit peculiar and she knew many languages. I did not like her much though. She got frustrated translating what she was saying in different languages. The thing that I hated most about this tour and any tour for that matter is that we were on a schedule. It is no secret that I like to take my time with everything. I eat slowly. I take things in slowly. I really do not like fast paced life. So when the tour guide yelled at me to get on the bus while I was looking for my brother at a memorial site that showed everywhere that Portugal had discovered I could not deal with it. I hate going on tours. But, at the same time I understand that going on a tour like what we did was and is the best way to see and experience a city over a very short period of time. On the tour we saw memorial sites, an old fortress, an old church (of course), and a car museum. Before we even got to Lisboa David had googled what to do in Lisboa and he came up with this car museum. He was so excited to see a car museum filled with expensive, fancy, modern cars that when walked into the museum of ‘coches’ it was entertaining to me to see the look on the face when the ‘cars’ were in fact ‘carriages’ like in Cinderella. We also were given a chance to visit the old part of Lisboa, which was by far my favorite. Some of the old houses in Portugal are not painted, but instead they are decorated with tiles. This was something about the old part of the city that made it so beautiful. I could just imagine the people who walked around the streets the many years ago. After the tour we went to lunch. Oh lunch. People lined outside of the restaurants basically forcing you to come and sit with them to have some business. I do not like this part of the experience in Portugal. As Americans, we know that we like our time and space to consider our options before being pushed in any situation. Well, we were not given any time or space into taking into account where we wanted to eat that day. Personally, I wanted to sit down as quickly as possible as to not be harassed by any more people with menus. On a side note, Portuguese people really like their eggs. They seem to put it on everything. Whether it be on their hamburger or their steak, it is considered to be their ‘specialty’ at each restaurant that I have seen. After lunch, Gildi and Marshy were too tired to continue looking around the city. So they asked the waiter how long it would take them to walk back to the hotel (we did not know because the tour guide bus had dropped us off). His answer? 10 minutes uphill. So they decided to walk. On the other hand, me and David went exploring. We walked around the city looking at the shops and the restaurants. We eventually reached the ocean, which made the wandering around totally worth it. There was a nice breeze, a beautiful view, and tons of fish. After a while of doing this it was getting a little hot for us and we decided to turn back. So we started our so-called 10-minute walk. It was in no way any close to being 10 minutes. We did not time it or anything, but if I had to guess how long we were walking uphill for I would have to guess about 45 minutes. All we kept wondering on the whole way back was whether or not Marshy and Gildi were able to walk it or if they took a taxi. We found out it was a combination of both. That night we had dinner outside at a really good really cute restaurant. We were finally able to get white sangria! I had been searching for it for a while and it was really good! My first real day in Portugal was a success, even with the semi-cranky tour guide. The pictures attached are David with his cars, me at the the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and a picture of what the old part of Portugal looks like.